The last affordable neighborhoods in Manhattan: ‘The air is fresher up here’

Long an ignored section of New York City by outsiders, the two neighborhoods that make up northern Manhattan are attracting attention not all of it welcome

Johnathan Audubon Perez, winds his way through the streets of upper Manhattan. He crosses fresh fruit vendors and men pushing carts selling fried pork. Street intersections reveal children playing in the water of opened fire hydrants, and older generations gathering around improvised domino tables. Bachata is blasting out of one window high up on one block, and from the portable speakers of a stoop on another.

These are the scenes of summer in Washington Heights. The neighborhood is baking from the heat, but it is alive.

Long a vastly ignored section of the city by outsiders, the Heights and Inwood the two neighborhoods that take up the entire northern section of Manhattan from 155th street to 220th street have suddenly attracted wide excitement and attention. Why? Real estate firms and media outlets have named them the last affordable neighborhoods on the island both for renting and buying. The median rental price in July in Washington Heights was $2,200, well below the $3,508 average for the rest of the island, according to real estate group Citi Habitats. According to real estate broker Cole Thompson, one-bedroom apartments in the area are available for $300,000, considerably less than the median $815,000 price of a one-bedroom across Manhattan as a whole.

But bargains for outsiders aside, for many whose families settled in the two neighborhoods decades ago, the added attention to their homes is creating a great sense of insecurity.

With their blocks upon blocks of hundred-year-old sturdy, brick apartment buildings, decorated with zigzagging metal fire escapes, the two upper Manhattan neighborhoods have long been the home to working class and immigrant communities who have enjoyed affordable, quality lives for a century.

Led Black, a 41-year-old telecom analyst and founder of online news and culture hub the Uptown Collective, grew up in the same Washington Heights apartment he lives in today with his wife and daughters, where he pays a city-controlled rent of below $1,000 a month.

My mother was always about community, my house was always the house that people came to to have a meal, Black says.

New tenants are a blessing for landlords who can legally hike up rents far more than if residents stay put from 20% if nothing is done to the unit to 250% and up if work is done.

As a result, the Rev Antonio Almonte the pastor at Inwoods Church of Our Lady Queen of Martyrs says tenant harassment is rife.

Its often indirect harassment. Landlords refusing to turn on heat in the winter for years. Not replacing old pipes. Doing awkward repairs. If a toilet is broken, taking a week to fix it. When tenants complain, they are offered a few thousand dollars to move out. Almonte says these stories are very common and he hears them constantly.

But with renewed attention, landlords are not the only threat to the affordable, high-quality of life of these two neighborhoods.

In Inwood, neighborhood activists have had their hands full battling Mayor Bill de Blasios housing plans for the city that have zoomed in on this neighborhood.

The housing plan would allow for the construction of more market-rate developments, providing a proportion of them were categorized as affordable. Residents are not prepared to compromise, however, and see the acceptance of such a plan in a neighborhood void of any luxury development as a route of no return. Activists won a victory last week, when plans for a first construction were blocked by a city council responding to local pressure.

Mark Willis, a senior policy fellow at New York Universitys Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy, says blocking developments would only make the problem of affordability worse.

Baez stresses the rezoning plan is not yet finished, and there is ample time for community members to continue participating in its design. For now, residents have until September 2017 to express concerns.

Though he grew up in northern Manhattan, Perezs career means he no longer spends all his time in New York. But he always comes back to the same apartment his grandmother moved to in the late 1950s, and where his mother was born in the early 1960s.

Hes noticed some changes brought on by the new residents. They call 311 on us for everything fire hydrants, music in the street, he says.

While Inwood and Washington Heights are respectively the third and fourth <a draggable=”true” href=”https://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/crime-safety-report/ranking” data-link-name=”in” body link” class=”u-underline”>safest

neighborhoods in Manhattan, behind only the Upper West and Upper East sides, when it comes to noise complaints, they are top.

Today, the apartment is still filled with family members, but of his generation. The landlord has tried everything, including offering money, to get them out. But they wont go.